“Yes. We have different fathers — my mother married again, when she came here from Ireland.” She pulled down the corners of her mouth in a wry smile. “It wasn’t a success, the marriage. Mr. Edwards turned out to be what the novelists used to call a fortune hunter.”
“Not just the novelists,” I said.
She inclined her head in an ironic little nod of acknowledgment, smiling. “Anyway, in the end Mr. Edwards checked out — worn down, I suppose, by the effort of pretending to be what he wasn’t.”
“Which was? Apart from a fortune hunter, that is.”
“What he wasn’t was fair and honest. What he was, well, I don’t think anyone knew what he really was, including himself.”
“So he left.”
“He left. And that’s when my mother brought me into the firm, young though I was. I turned out to have a talent for selling perfume, to the surprise of all, especially me.”
I sighed and sat down beside her. “You mind if I smoke?” I asked.
“Please, go ahead.”
I produced my silver case with the monogram on it. I’ve never found out whose monogram it is — I bought the case in a pawnshop. I opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head. I lit up. It’s pleasant, smoking by the sea; the salt air gives a fresh tang to the tobacco. Today, for some reason, it reminded me of being young, which was strange, since I hadn’t grown up by the ocean.
Once again, eerily, she seemed to read my thoughts. “Where are you from, Mr. Marlowe?” she asked. “Where were you born?”
“Santa Rosa. A nowhere town north of San Francisco. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Somehow it always seems important to know where someone comes from, don’t you think?”
I leaned back against the rough wood wall of the shelter and rested the elbow of my smoking arm in the palm of my left hand. “Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, “you puzzle me.”
“Do I?” She seemed amused. “Why is that?”
“I said already — I’m the hired help, but you’re talking to me like someone you’ve known all your life, or someone you’d like to know for the rest of it. What gives?”
She pondered this for a while, her eyes lowered; then she looked at me from under her lashes. “I suppose it’s that you’re not at all what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone hard and smart-mouthed, like Nico. But you’re not like that at all.”
“How do you know? Maybe I’m just putting on a show for you, pretending to be a pussycat when really I’m a skunk.”
She shook her head, closing her eyes briefly. “I’m not that poor a judge of men, despite evidence to the contrary.”
She had not moved at all, not that I’d noticed, yet somehow her face was closer to mine than it had been. There seemed nothing for it but to kiss her. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t respond, either. She just sat there and took it, and when I drew back she smiled a little and looked wistful. I was suddenly very conscious of the sound of the waves, of the pebbles hissing and the gulls crying. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” She spoke very softly, almost in a whisper.
I got to my feet and dropped the cigarette on the sand and put my heel on it. “I think we should go back,” I said.
As we returned through the trees, she took my arm again. She seemed quite at ease, and I had to wonder if that kiss had really happened. We came out onto the lawn, and there was the house before us in all its ghastly grandeur. “Hideous, isn’t it,” Clare said, reading my thoughts again. “It’s my mother’s house, you know, not mine and Richard’s. That’s another reason for Richard’s moroseness.”
“Because he has to live with his mother-in-law?”
“Can’t be pleasant for a man, or for a man like Richard, anyway.”
I stopped and made her stop with me. I had sand in my shoes and salt grit in my eyes. “Mrs. Cavendish, why are you telling me these things? Why are you treating me like we’re on the most intimate of terms?”
“Why did I let you kiss me, you mean?” Her eyes sparkled; she was laughing at me, though not unkindly.
“All right, then,” I said. “Why did you let me kiss you?”
“I suppose I wanted to see what it would be like.”
“And what was it like?”
She thought for a moment. “Nice. I liked it. I’d like you to do it again, sometime.”
“I’m sure that could be arranged.”
We walked on, her arm in mine. She was humming to herself. She seemed happy. This, I thought, is not the woman who walked into my office yesterday and examined me coldly from behind her veil, sizing me up; this is someone else.
“One of the movie people built it,” she said. She was talking about the house again. “Irving Thalberg, Louis B. Mayer — one of those moguls, I forget which one. They shipped the stone in from Italy, somewhere in the Apennines. Good thing the Italians can’t see what was done with it.”
“Why do you live here?” I asked. “You told me you’re rich — you could move somewhere else.”
I glanced at her. A little shadow had settled on her smooth brow. “I don’t know,” she said. She was silent for a few paces, then spoke again: “Maybe I can’t face the prospect of being alone with my husband. He’s not particularly good company.”
It wasn’t for me to comment on that, so I didn’t.
We were approaching the conservatory. She asked if I would come in. “Maybe you’d like a drink now?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m a working man, with a job to do. Is there anything else you want to tell me about Nico Peterson before I apply my bloodhound nose to his trail?”
“I can’t think of anything.” She picked a fragment of leaf from the sleeve of her linen jacket. “I’d just like you to trace him for me,” she said. “I don’t want him back. I’m not sure I wanted him in the first place.”
“Why did you get him, then?”
She made a clown’s lugubrious face. I liked the way she did it, making fun of herself. “He represented danger, I suppose,” she said. “As I told you, I get bored easily. He made me feel alive for a while, in a slightly soiled sort of way.” She gave me a level look. “Can you understand that?”
“I can understand it.”
She laughed. “But you don’t approve.”
“It’s not for me to approve or otherwise, Mrs. Cavendish.”
“Clare,” she said, again in that breathy whisper. I just stood there, feeling stolid and craggy-faced, like a cigar-store Indian. She gave a sad little shrug, then shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket and drew in her shoulders. “I’d like you to find out where Nico is,” she said, “what he’s doing, why he pretended to be dead.” She looked off across the smooth green lawn, toward the trees. Behind her there was another, ghostly version of the two of us reflected in the glass of the conservatory. She said, “It’s strange to think of him, you know, being somewhere right now, doing something. I’d got used to believing he was dead, and I find it hard to adjust.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “He shouldn’t be too difficult to trace. He doesn’t sound like a professional, and I doubt he’ll have covered his tracks too well, especially since he won’t be expecting anyone to be looking for him, him being dead, supposedly.”
“What will you do? How will you go about it?”
“I’ll have a look at the coroner’s report. Then I’ll talk to some people.”
“What kind of people? The police?”
“The cops tend not to be very helpful to someone who’s not one of their own. But I know one or two guys down at headquarters.”
“I wouldn’t like to think of it being generally known that it’s me who’s looking for him.”
“You mean you don’t want your mother to find out.”